Google Brings Major Updates at Google I/O 2013

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By: Rich DeMuro 5/24/2013

Every year Google holds a big conference called I/O (input/output) where it shows off its latest innovations.

This year, Google is making it easier to automatically organize our photo collections, plus the company also introduced a music service to compete with Spotify.

“5500 folks come and get a chance to listen to some very senior people at Google Talk about what they’re working on but also ask them some questions,” said Google Technologist, Daniel Sieberg.

One of the highlights for this year’s conference included a new, more powerful mapping experience.

“The whole idea is to discover those places you’ve never been before or even a coffee shop or pizza place that’s in your neighborhood,” said Sieberg.

Google also launched a new Spotify-like unlimited music service called “All Access.”

Early adopters who signed up soon after the announcement got a little discount–$8 a month instead of $10.

The only downside so far is that All Access is a bit more limited than the competition since it’s only available on Android devices, at least for now.

The biggest news this year, Google can now automatically help us organize our growing digital photo collections.

And Google will sift through and highlight the best, identifying smiles and landmarks while ignoring duplicates and blurry shots. Users can even search within the photo collection for specific objects like “dog” or themes like “beach.”

Users now get 15 gigabytes of free storage.

Google servers are acting a bit like your own personal darkroom, where we’re taking a little bit of that labor intensive work of adjusting the lighting and making some sort of manual corrections to your photos.

It will even surprise you with what it calls “Auto Awesome.”

Don’t worry, your originals are always intact.

Finally, Google also announced an unlocked version of Samsung’s Galaxy S4 smartphone with stock android software on it will soon be available for purchase.